The Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective was a highly popular, award-winning old-time radio series that aired from 1946 to 1951 across ABC, CBS, and NBC. Based loosely on the hard-boiled San Francisco private eye created by Dashiell Hammett in The Maltese Falcon, the radio show took a distinctly more tongue-in-cheek and sardonic approach to the character than the darker novel or the famous 1941 Humphrey Bogart film noir.